Thirty Years of Sociolinguistic Research on

“Tengo” and “Yo tengo”  

By 

Nydia Flores-Ferrán 

Rutgers University

 

Abstract

 

A thirty-year span of sociolinguistic research will be discussed in the presentation. In particular, the talk will focus on research conducted on the variable use of subject personal pronouns, a linguistic feature that has been empirically researched as early as Barrenechea and Alonso (1969, 1977) and Pérez Sala (1973), studies which were conducted among speakers in Argentina and Puerto Rico respectively. Since Spanish, as is the case of many languages, is a null subject language, the focal point of research regarding this feature has been to determine the linguistic, stylistic, and social factors that condition the expression of the subject or the use of the null subject (i.e., Ávila-Jiménez, 1996; Barrenechea, and Alonso, 1969; Bayley and Pease-Álvarez, 1996; Bentivoglio, 1980; Cameron, 1992; 1995; Flores-Ferrán, 2002, 2005, 2007). In general, statistical evidence points to the fact that bilingual and monolingual speakers of Spanish tend to favor the use of the null form in oral production. Nonetheless, findings in Flores-Ferrán, (2002, 2005) suggest that the verb’s Person and Number affect the use of overt subject personal pronouns (SPPs). Her studies have also documented the following among other findings: That the first person singular, yo, tends to be overtly produced by speakers more than any other subject personal pronoun. However, speakers tend to disfavor the use of overt subject personal pronouns with plural verbs. In addition, the semantic type of a verb tends to affect SPP expression. Flores-Ferrán (2002, 2005) has also attested to increases in the use of SPPs according to the factor of discourse connectedness. That is, the further an SPP is from its referent, the higher the use of overt SPPs. Finally, when speakers change subject referents, they tend to express SPPs in higher frequencies but that expression is not categorical.

 
Despite the overwhelming evidence that has identified several factors that systematically condition the use of the overt and null forms, this syntactic variable remains highly debated today among scholars who investigate Spanish in the Latin American, the U.S., and Peninsular varieties (i.e., Cameron, 1995; Enríquez, 1984; Flores-Ferrán, 2004; Hochberg, 1986; Lapidus and Otheguy, 2005; Lipski, 1977; Morales, 1999; Silva-Corvalán, 1982; Otheguy, Zentella, and Livert, 2007; Travis, 2005). We learn why it is so debated and the challenges faced by researchers.
 
The presentation will also draw connections for future researchers in matters such as the sociolinguistic interview process, the envelope of variation, concerns with competing forms, issues regarding dialect origin, and how we can advance research on this linguistic feature and others.